‘Uncertain world, unstoppable India’: Sir Martin Sorrell on India’s growth, global slowdown, and AI’s big impact at ET WLF

Geopolitical uncertainties and flickers of concern are leading consumers to postpone buying decisions and putting pressure on demand across markets, even as infrastructure needs to keep pace with the India growth story, Sir Martin Sorrell, founder and executive chairman of tech-led digital advertising and marketing services company S4Capital, told ET in an interview.

“The biggest problem is geopolitical. Conflicts cause uncertainty and impact productivity… we’ve been through a golden era. I think we’re coming into another golden era, but it’s going to be different. I think probably it will be less gold,” Sorrell, 80, said while speaking on the sidelines of the ET World Leaders Forum.

He said from a global point of view, growth could settle below 3%, even though historically, economies have done better than 3%.

Drawing comparisons with India, he said: “India is growing very fast, there is GDP growth and unique favourable demographics compared to, say, China. However, infrastructure is being put under huge pressure as India is growing very fast.”

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on Saturday at the ET World Leaders Forum that “India has become a hope for the world because of its resilience”, and noted that the country’s contribution to the world economy would soon be 20%.

At the same time, a spate of global leadership shake-ups across consumer giants such as Nestle, Unilever, Diageo, Kenvue and WPP group have unfolded over the past year or so, and India too had its share of C-suite churn with companies such as HUL and L’Oreal announcing sudden leadership changes in recent months.

Citing that tenures of chief executives are turning shorter across markets, Sorrell said: “The average life of a chief executive officer is about five years; the average life of a chief marketing officer is probably about two years. If you talk to the head hunters, you’d get some data and I’m pretty sure it’s shortened because you have to make strategic bets”.

He said for CEOs, efficiency is going to be far more important. “Inflation has been much more stubborn, and interest rates are higher than we thought they were. So it’s going to be far more volatile,” Sorrell, who had also founded WPP Plc, the world’s largest advertising and communications group, said.

Highlighting the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on advertising, he said: “Technology is improving at light speed. Commercials that we’re producing using AI are improving literally day by day, week by week, month by month”.

He noted that Meta, Amazon, Disney, Microsoft, Netflix and Spotify are all spending trillions of dollars building AI capacity. “So instead of spending money on marketing, they are spending money on building AI capacity. So the impact on industry in the long term is very positive for digital,” he added.

However, “social and management implications of AI could be huge… as people are worried about jobs, about what impact AI will have. And that causes a lot of uncertainty”.

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